Thursday, 30 May 2013

I've been asked by the good folk at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2013 to pass on the news that on June 29th they will be hosting an event to celebrate master animator/director Richard Williams's 80th birthday this year. Sounds like an afternoon not to be missed!

To read more about 'Richard Williams: 80 Animated Years' please click THIS LINK.

Friday, 24 May 2013

Congratulations to the hugely talented Stuart Hancock on being long-listed at the Jerry Goldsmith Awards for his amazing musical score to The Last Belle!

Stuart Hancock at the recording of The Last Belle score.

And as if that wasn't enough, Stuart has also been long-listed for four other music awards: Best Music in Full Length Format, Best Music in Documentary, Best Music in Advertisement, and Best Music in Promotional Film.

And for more recent followers of this blog who may have missed my original posting from way-back-when, click HERE for footage of us all recording The Last Belle score with the Bratislava Symphony Orchestra.

Monday, 13 May 2013

I've just come across some bits and bobs tucked into a folder that remind me just how much fun it can be to work in a non-digital, low-tech kind of way. Part of the brief for The Last Belle was to hand draw everything - even the technical and props stuff - so that the film would have an old-school, retro feel to it, like a 1940s cartoon.

Here's one example of how we applied 'retro thinking' to the film - During the plot of The Last Belle we establish just how much beer Wally is drinking before his date. He's always holding a can, or drinking from a can, or littering the floor with the empties. It didn't even occur to me this might cause production problems further down the line, so I merrily scribbled out storyboard panels like this:

And rough layouts of the inside of his fridge, like this:

Then came the design phase, where we got into the details of exactly how these beer cans should look...

It turns out there are very specific colours that imply 'alcohol', rather than 'soft drink'. I had never been conscious of this, but when we tried various invented colour schemes for the cans they always ended up looking like lemonade, or Coke, or something similar. The solution was to go out and buy every variety of beer can we could find and bring it back to the studio for, er, a study session.

Tough job, but somebody had to do it. All in the name of Art, etc...

And we found that, amazingly enough, there are a certain range of colours that always crop up on alcohol tins. Strange what you learn while working on a film. So we took this information - making sure our can didn't look too similar to any particular real-life brand - and applied it to our design.

My preferred method of finding colours for a specific prop, or character, in The Last Belle was to use marker pens and coloured pencils on paper, and then when I'd got something I was happy with hand it over to a Colour Modeller - in this case the brilliant Sam Spacey - to refine, and find the equivalent range of colours in cel paint, or to mix them specially.

In the meantime, while all this was going on, it suddenly dawned on me and co-layout artist Mark Naisbitt that these cans, and the lettering on them, were very labour-intensive to draw... and we had literally thousands of cans to draw: hundreds in the background layouts and thousands within the animation itself, with all that lettering and design in different sizes and perspectives throughout.

Not something that'd be a problem in the digital realm, but to hand-draw all of these thousands of cans... Nightmare!

Then came a very low-tech brainwave: I flattened out our can design, drew it on a sheet of paper, wrapped it round a real beer can, and simply photographed it from every possible angle. I took endless photos, just like these:

Then we made up several sheets of drawings, tracing from the photos (without rulers, to keep a hand-drawn feel). Mark also distorted some of the can drawings to give us scrunched up cans:

Once we'd got this library of can drawings it was fairly straightforward to photocopy them at various sizes and cut them together to create layout designs. Here's a can layout by Mark:

Here's the same layout drawing photocopied onto cel, hand painted﻿, and shot against the background:

And here's a small section of the fridge interior:

It's all amazingly low-tech, but I found it strangely satisfying for that very reason...

Using this method we churned out the thousands of cans, with all their details, that we needed for the film. And it was fast to do.

Who needs Photoshop when you've got scissors, sticky tape, and a photocopier tucked away in the corner?

Monday, 6 May 2013

This week I ought to have been hunting through more Last Belle artwork boxes. But instead I've been hunting through my kitchen cupboard.

Why?

To share this with you:

It's my Who Framed Roger Rabbit mug, dating from the year the movie was released, 1988. Both the mug and the movie are celebrating their 25th anniversary!

Half the colours on this mug have been worn away by time. Even Jessica's hair has gone white with age. But amazingly the mug is still whole and uncracked, after more than 9000 fillings of tea and coffee.

The film itself is - I'm sure - slightly less faded than my mug, having had a nice new digital overhaul onto Blu Ray to celebrate it's birthday.

I've mentioned before on this blog how working on Roger Rabbit was a huge turning point in my life. It was the first movie I ever worked on professionally, the project that introduced me to my mentor Richard Williams, the film that allowed me the chance to absorb how an A-list director like Robert Zemeckis works, and the event that cemented friendships that I treasure to this day. Working on Roger Rabbit was an experience that happened such a long, long time ago - something as ancient as my faded mug - whilst at the same time feeling as immediate as if it happened yesterday - as shiny and vibrant as the re-mastered Blu-Ray.

About Me

Neil Boyle is the award-winning director of 'The Last Belle', a 20 minute animated short featuring two characters journeying towards a blind date: WALLY who suffers a nightmarish drunken trip across London as he races against the clock to the rendezvous; and ROSIE who waits in a bar dreaming of how wonderful her date is going to be... if he ever shows up.
'The Last Belle' features the voice talents of Sienna Guillory (The Time Machine, Resident Evil), Colin McFarlane (The Dark Knight, Torchwood) and Amanda Donohoe (Castaway, L.A. Law). The music is by award winning composer Stuart Hancock. The producer is Rebecca Neville.
For more info on The Last Belle visit our website at www.thelastbelle.com
Neil is currently developing a feature-length film of Michael Morpurgo's award-winning book 'Kensuke's Kingdom' with co-director Kirk Hendry, screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce, and producer Sarah Radclyffe.